Black Rock, the New-York based investment firm that last year merged with Merrill Lynch, is reported to be the company that Steve Goldin of InterCap Holdings is trying to lure to move its operations to the Princeton Junction Train Station. Goldin has said he represents at least one company interested in moving its headquarters to Princeton Junction, but will not reveal its name or its business. ##M:[more]##Commercial real estate broker Jerry Fennelly says Black Rock has been looking for office space within walking distance of a New Jersey train station for over a year.
Speculation began after Goldin said on June 20 that his company, which owns 25 acres in the redevelopment zone, would donate $1.5 million to the township to conduct another charrette. (See Goldin’s letter outlining his proposal on page 2.)
Black Rock currently has offices for more than 1,”500 employees in Plainsboro at the Merrill Lynch campus on Scudders Mill Road. According to Fennelly, the company’s CEO, Larry Fink, wants to be closer to a train station. “They want to be on the train tracks, but so far we have pushed them away,” says Fennelly.
Fennelly says the company is looking for a large building close to a train station that would make commuting to and from Manhattan easy for its employees. “They hire a lot of people, and they can go anywhere they choose. They would like to be in West Windsor but we’re not accommodating them,” said Fennelly. “People here said they don’t want a 700,”000 square foot tower at the train station.”
Fennelly says he is not involved with Black Rock. However, he says he knows the company, which has many executives who live in Princeton and the surrounding area, has been searching for a space of about that size for over a year. “We have to be friendlier to the companies that are trying to come here. We have a message that we’ve sent that we don’t want anyone else to come in,” says Fennelly. “Everyone is complaining about how high taxes are, but they don’t want to let anyone else in. But if you stop letting people come in, you’re going to have a negative population growth, and that is going make taxes go up and property values go down.”
Meanwhile Goldin and InterCap are making a push to move forward with plans to fund another workshop. Goldin says he plans to meet with residents in groups of 10 to 12 to gauge the community’s interest in having another charrette.
Goldin has met with Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh and Charles Morgan about his possible involvement in another charrette process. While Hsueh has backed Hillier throughout the process, Morgan at one point suggested that Hillier could be replaced by a company that would give the township a more effective charrette. He had also promoted the idea of a non-binding referendum to determine whether the township is in favor of a redevelopment.
Morgan says now that he favors undertaking a survey of residents to gauge their opinions on the redevelopment. “With a survey, we can ask multiple questions on various aspects of the redevelopment. A referendum would only reach registered voters,” said Morgan.
The document advisory committee has been a controversial topic among West Windsor council members. It is a group of residents, all of whom supported Morgan and his running mates Will Anklowitz and George Borek in the May 8 council election. The members are Chairperson Alison Miller, David Siegel, Virginia Manzari, Valerie Servis, and former mayor Bob Murray.
According to council members Linda Geevers and Heidi Kleinman, Morgan sent notification about the committee’s first official meeting to the press before he sent it to his fellow council members. Morgan has since said it was a mistke to form the group in that manner, and has said Kleinman and Geevers should nominate residents they would like included on the committee.
The committee has begun to formulate questions that could be included on a survey. At its meeting on June 28, the committee discussed whether it would be more effective to contract an outside company to conduct the survey. Morgan estimated the cost of such an undertaking to be $20,”000.
“I have been portrayed as being opposed to redevelopment,” said Morgan on July 1. “Nothing could be farther from the truth.”
